


Animal Crackers

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 23:46:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Biscuits, obsession, astrophysics and sexgames. A twisty little Season 6b ficlet: weird and dark and yes, heavily reliant on the prompt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Animal Crackers

A/N: Cookies are Barnum’s Animals for the 53 varieties, not Cadburys, because they have but 5 creatures among them and less elaborate distinguishing features. Sorry for this Americanism: make a better cracker, Britons, and Two will nomnom it.   
  
Quotes are 1) "The Tyger," from William Blake's "Songs of Experience," 2) a stage direction from The Winter's Tale, by Shakespeare, 3) Matthew 19:24, New Testament and 4) from the Sefer Shoftim account of Samson in the Tanakh.   
  
Title is from "Animal Crackers In My Soup"(Curly Top 1935).  
  
  
  
  
  
 _"When I get hold of the big bad wolf  
I just push him under to drown  
Then I bite him in a million bits  
And I gobble him right down"_  
  
\--Animal Crackers In My Soup  
(Curly Top 1935)  
  
  
  
“Animal crackers in my soup,” the Doctor sang to himself as he used his sonic screwdriver to fiddle with his TARDIS’s controls. He paused to select one biscuit from the open cardboard box beside him. He looked at it briefly, squinted to determine it was, in fact, a wee rhino, and then shoved it in his mouth before continuing with the verse, chewing his way through the bar, “Monkeys (CRUNCH) and raaaabits loop the loop.”   
  
The Master smoothed his goatee. Waiting for the CIA to send dispatches was akin to waiting for Godot some days—though the temporal mechanics of interminability were always dodgy in the Vortex, where they lingered in closely-monitored dry-dock between missions. At least he had company this time, not like that never-ending, plodding affair with the War Lords. And thankfully the Doctor’s calling in the High Council hadn’t resulted in their mutual annihilation.   
  
The CIA apparently found him--well,  _them_ , from the looks of the current arrangement--more valuable than the Master had imagined they might. It seemed they weren't expendable, or at least that they were useful enough that the CIA could be bothered to cover for the Master and arrange a reprieve for the Doctor. Which was impressive, as the High Council had been eager to kill both the operative and the interloper in a fit of pique over not having been made aware of the War Lords' ambitions earlier.   
  
“Whatever could that noise you're making be?” The Master, hands folded over one another and perched on his right knee, sat sideways in a chair he’d ordered the TARDIS to add to the console room. He watched the Doctor work with a slight, crooked smile.   
  
“Er,” the Doctor pushed his tongue over his teeth, running it to the back molars and resting it there, pressed against his cheek. It was such an idiosyncratic gesture of embarrassment that the Master couldn’t help but find it amusing. “It’s from "Curly Top," actually.”  
  
“Ah,” the Master snickered, “Didn’t your mother play that for your sisters? During one of our breaks? I seem to have forgotten the music,  _somehow,_ " and lead was not as thick as his sarcasm, "Yet I remember it being generally terrible. Though if I recall correctly, it does end in a character with rather unlikely hair saying “Oh my word!” Perhaps I’m finally beginning to grasp the inspiration behind this rather esoteric regeneration of yours.”  
  
“Kindly shush up and have a cracker, hm?” The Doctor raised one dark eyebrow and shook the bright red box at the Master, who unwound himself from the chair with feline grace and approached, suspiciously selecting one cookie from the box and examining it thoroughly.   
  
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forest of the night.” The Master twirled the little biscuit by the tail between his thumb and forefinger. “What immortal hand or eye could frame  _thy_  fearful symmetry?” He slid it into his mouth consideringly.   
  
Rising to the challenge, the Doctor put down his screwdriver and pulled out another for himself—a bear this time.   
  
“Exit,” he pronounced, wiggling it at the Master, “pursued by a.” He popped it into his mouth, satisfied.   
  
“You know, the Master said in a meditative tone, drawing the next cracker, “It is easier for a camel," and so it was, a little biscuit dromedary, "to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” There was a late Venusian proverb that would have been exceedingly clever there, but that wasn't the game they were playing. They were racing each other deeper into a chosen canon. They were tracing timelines backwards. They were following one another back to their co-mingled boyhood, reawakening the teasing contests and deadly serious affections of an earlier era.   
  
The Master accompanied his faux-ponderous declaration by wrapping his fingers around the Doctor’s shoulder. To the Doctor, the motion was like that of a spider curling around its prey. Balling it up in silk to keep it safe and warm and just exactly where it was. Of course, spiders intend to consume entirely what they devoted so much time to preparing. Spiders killed with such care, only to liquefy what they’d caught and suck away its body, its essence, until it had nothing more to give.   
  
The image of the Master’s mouth on him, draining him dry, taking everything it could, leaving the Doctor spent and empty, was both overwhelmingly erotic and terrifying.   
  
That was the essence of his former dearest friend, his current partner—that frision of danger, that catch-me-if-you-can  _spark_  that made the Doctor do the stupidest things just to impress him, just to be near him, just to show him up, just to make him angry.   
  
Ultimately it was why he’d left the Master. Not because the Master had gone too far—though even then the Doctor could see the day coming, had seen it coming for years. He hadn’t liked the person he was with the Master; arrogant and careless of others, careless of anything but the Master. The Doctor had seen the collapse of binary systems—stars stealing light from each other in great fiery gulps, collapsing into black holes, rotating faster and faster into oblivion, beautiful and grotesque. He didn’t wait around to find out which one of them would end up the smaller star in a gravity-war. And maybe he  _was_  a coward, but the Doctor didn’t want to die like that.   
  
But he could so rarely  _stop_  himself while within the sphere of the Master's influence, and having gotten away once, he wasn’t at all sure of his ability to escape that heavy, relentlessly attractive pull again. Drawing a lion, the Doctor swallowed. He looked around at the interior of his own console room—and now that he was trapped it looked so drab, so thoroughly uninspiring, where before it had always been the wonderful threshold of his next adventure. Placing the cookie on his tongue and sliding his hand along the Master’s black jacket even as he looked away from him, the Doctor muttered “the honey in the lion.”  
  
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” the Master muttered, drawing close, catching the Doctor’s hand with his own, pressing his lips against the Doctor's, “You  _nasty_ , uncouth man.”  
  
He swept his tongue abruptly into the Doctor’s mouth, tasting sugar and shortening, oil of lemon and the Doctor’s first reluctant, then engaging tongue. What he could taste of the biscuit in the Doctor’s mouth was not too sweet. More like a communion wafer or a bit of bread than a proper biscuit—like something substantive and necessary and a touch whimsical—and it suited the Doctor.   
  
The Doctor pressed him off, lightly. “We’ve finished off the box,” he muttered like an excuse, like a reason to stop, like he’d thought the better of this. Oh no. Honey in the lion, the Doctor had started it.  
  
“I’m not near finished with you.” The Master’s eyes glinted hard, and his smile grew dangerous.  
  
“If  _you_  were an animal,” teasing, taunting, threatening, the Master whispered it into the Doctor’s ear, silky and durable like a vow, “I would hunt you down. I would eat you and steal your very atoms. I would wear your skin around my own. I would mount you,” here a pelvic thrust, so the Doctor could  _feel_  the pun, a hand on his side, gripping—never a touch from him that wasn’t slightly startling, “up against the wall in my favorite room. One I never let anyone else go into, and I could, I  _would,_  just  _look_  at you every day. I would keep you as a pet. I would tame you. I would be patient, until you’d rejoice at my caresses and eat from my hand and sleep at my side. And you’d love me and call me your Master, and if I opened your cage you’d refuse to run.” The Master smiled, slow and sleek, at the Doctor’s frightened expression. “How does that sound, Doctor?”  
  
“Stop it,” the Doctor hissed, “You stop that this instant,”  
  
The Master laughed, tight and joyful. The Doctor was such a delightful coward this time around. He wanted to terrify and protect him, exhaust and replenish him.  
  
“Never,” the Master promised, and he kissed him, hungry and without a trace of sympathy like the animals they were under their titles, under the names they hid beneath them: like wounds concealed below fresh scabs. Despite the post-biological pretences of their high-end bodies, below the twining veins that coddled all four of their hearts like vines around buildings, they were simple creatures really, whether the Doctor was willing to admit to it or not. And like a tamed animal himself, the Master would cleave to him in sleep later that night when they were done fucking and he’d exhausted the excuse of need and want and pleasure that he used to justify, for however long it would hold, his desire to be inside the Doctor, always.


End file.
